The other day I was debugging an error in one of my unit tests, and found it hard to track down because when I ran PHPUnit, it ran all the tests contained in the file where my problem unit test was located. After some Googling and reading the PHPUnit Api Docs, I found that you can specify a test, among other tests, by adding a comment with the @group annotation.

Using this "@group" annotation tells PHPUnit to combine these tests and allows you you specify a "--group" setting on the command line to only run those. He includes some sample code showing how it can be used. This can be very useful for combining results for certain kinds of tests (say, all related to bugfixes) without having to run everything all over again.

So how can you practice using regex if you are limited to just using them in your code? The answer is to use a utility, of which there are many, that uses regex for performing search and replace. I'm sure everyone is familiar with the standard "find x and replace it with y" type of search and replace. Most IDEs and text editors have built in regex engines to handle search and replace. In this article I'd like to walk through a series of exercises to help you practice using regex.

His examples are based on Netbeans but can be used in just about any IDE that supports regex (or even just your code). He shows how to match word boundaries, do some grouping, work with back references and doing some search/replace based on multiple groupings.

Thanks to a discussion on the Zend Framework mailing list I learned about a new feature, a feature that allows for grouping action controllers in subdirectories! Well, this is more of an unknown and undocumented feature than new, as it is the part of the framework for at least 3 years. Why am I so hyped about this? Because it allows for better code organisation on larger projects. Heck, it might be useful on smaller ones too.

He gives an example of how it might be laid out and a few helpful hints he learned when trying it out:

• The subdirectory separator in the URI is the underscore and not the slash.
• The subdirectory name is uppercase: Subdirectory, not subdirectory. In the URI it's lowercase.
• The view directories for these subdirectories are lowercased, and not uppercase.

In short, we at php|architect recognize that we are standing on the shoulders of giants. We build our site, our training and our magazine using tools created by developers who are giving freely of themselves. We want to recognize a few of those who have had an impact specifically on the PHP community. The full details can be found on the Impact Awards page. Voting is open through the end of April to all php|architect subscribers. The winners will be announced at php|tek '11 in Chicago.

To vote, go over to the Impact Awards site and pick from their selections of people from categories like: the groups around various frameworks, integration/development, data management and up and coming projects. The winner will be presented with an actual award as designed by Toronto-based architect Alex Ilievski.

Yes, you read that right, EllisLab will be creating a CodeIgniter fork. For you. By you. We need six talented, opinionated, critical coders from the community who have a heavy personal and/or professional interest in CodeIgniter's ongoing development to act as deputies for the repository. [...] You can also nominate someone else for one of the six seats by emailing the above information on their behalf.

EllisLab will be going over the applications for the next few weeks and may ask the community to help them narrow things down. An NDA will have to be signed by the selected group and a rollout of this new fork is planned for sometime in Q1 of 2011.

It's not very difficult to handle pivot tables by hand but the work is always the same: groups by, totals, subtotals, totals per row... Now I want to write a class to pivot tables in PHP with the most common requirements (at least for me).

His examples takes a few rows of records from a MySQL result and shows how, with the help of a library he's developed, he can make a few commands and fetch just the data he needs including the column to pivot on. A few more examples are also included.

The idea is a wonderful one, and at first things looked like they were nothing but good. [...] At this point, signs of trouble began to crop up, and the good intentions began to result in a chill on the openness with suggestions of reducing input through moderation and discussions of who was a "member" of the standards group. [...] Since then, I have made several pleas, off-list and some on, to open the discussion and move things back to the way open source and specifically PHP works.

Greg's comments are shared by several in the community who wonder why something that could be such a key point for so many applications only involved a handful of the community. Be sure to check out the comments to hear the community voicing some of their own opinions on the subject, both for and against the way the standards group has been handled so far.

I am more than glad to announce the arrival, the announcement of the new PEAR Group for 2009 and 2010. With a few fresh faces in the Group, this year looks very promising with the mix of both new blood and experienced PEAR Group members.

Those selected include Chuck Burgess, Ken Guest, Christian Weiske and Brett Bieber. The PEAR Group helps to guide the PEAR project as a while and push out initiatives like the updated package manager - Pyrus.

As every year, the elections for the PEAR Group and PEAR President are happening. This year due to a few factors and messages lost in translation, we decided to extend the elections period by 10 days so more people would have time to vote! So remember to cast your vote at http://pear.php.net/election/ and you have until the the 5th of August 2009.

There's both group elections and an an election for president that all PEAR developers can vote on. Hurry! The deadline is Wednesday, August 15th!

This post will briefly discuss the formation of a Recommended PHP Standards Group, as put forward by a meeting of PHP developers at the conference. As would be expected, a bit of controversy surrounds this proposal, but my hope would be that it would be accepted and grow within the global PHP community in the coming years.

He talks about those in attendance and a sneak preview of some of the standards they're talking about - like those dealing with namespacing and exception naming.